by Nisi Shawl
Oh, she danced.
Oh!
He’d never thought to dance in such a way that a story was told, the lyrics incarnated in a sorrowful play-act that nevertheless rendered respect to every beat and evolution of the music. He could grasp the mothersong better, in heart if not mind, seeing the reggaezza’s dance. A small gathering hereabouts was silent, while further off the night disported in revelry and strife. He stood dumb, mouth hanging open, and watched with his whole self. Nothing lasts, and the best must be briefest: so too with this. When the performance ended, the gathering of Johnnys murmured the same word of appreciation. Never more in agreement, he softly chimed in too. For a moment more palm fronds rustled overhead, and breakers rolled, the gulls calling. Then the quiet smaller crowd spoke, laughed, and began dispersing into the greater. The reggaezza, thirsty, plucked a jar of Sea-john free right out of the hands of some passerby. Rude!—but the passing Johnny made neither mention nor moan.
The boy one walked up and pointed, saying, “Gimme dat.”
He passed over one of the skewers. The reggaezzo put half the length, three shrimp, into his mouth and drew the stick forth clean, crunching and chewing hungrily. The reggaezzo stank of old sweat and something herbal. He was as crushingly beautiful as Kéké, almost. Green constellations crept across the black sky of him. The reggaezzo spat some shelly wreckage and gobbled the other three shrimp.
“Dat one too!”
“I’m very sorry; I can’t. It’s my sister’s, not mine. Batalha asked me to hold it for her.”
“Aw, ain’t you just too posh?” The reggaezzo turned and called the girl. “Hey! Quick, come listen at dis idjit here. Sound straight off Dolorosa, dis one!”
The reggaezza came over, thin as a finger and yet strong. Hunger had melted all fat from her, the daily hours of dance showing in the ripple of her thighs and veiny strength of arm.
“Now just tell huh what you come dare said to me!”
“Only that I must hold these shrimp for my sister—”
The reggaezza threw back her head, whooping laughter. She said to him, “Little prince-boy, don’t you know we could lay duh worse cuss on any Johnny won’t give food, won’t give clothes, or turn away help from us reggaezzi? So you not Johnny den, ti prince?”
“I am Johnny.” His lips trembled, eyes close to tears, for there was great hot power in her, like the burning sureties of Batalha, like the bright god in Papa.
“Zas!” said the reggaezza, snapping her fingers. “I could go like dat and yo Mamans fall out duh fishing boat tomorrow and shark eat dem up screaming. Zas! and yo Papas slip from high cutting coconut, crack dere heads wide-open so dey drooling stupid forever! Or maybe you hate yo Mamans and yo Papas, and you love yo ownself much better? Den zas!, ti prince, and you—”
“Here! I didn’t know. They never want to tell me anything about reggaezzi. Please, won’t you take it now? I love them and Batalha best, but don’t curse them. Curse me.”
“See? You just too mean sometime. Duh little boy didn’t even know. Now you got him crying and I feel all bad. Johnny boy, you could keep dat fuh y’sistah. Salright, salright—don’t cry. Nobody ain’t cussing nobody tonight.”
“I thought duh boy was talking back smart. You know I can’t stand dat. Some posh asshole. Anyway it’s two whole days and no Ladder-to-Heaven. I need some smoke bad. I hate dis hunger. I hate how cold duh night feel. Gimme dat—I’ll eat it!”
He handed over the skewer and the reggaezza crouched down on her haunches, making the same short work of six big shrimp as the boy had. He lifted off his poncho and tucked it warmly round the girl’s shoulders, just as though the reggaezza were in creaky old age, not the veriest youth. The boy one squatted down beside and stroked her long matted hair; he said, “Couple more days, duh leaves be all brown and good, and we climb right back up duh Ladder-to-Heaven. I hate deese days too, but gotta eat some time, don’t we?”
She looked at the reggaezzo. “You don’t hear dat? You don’t hear Song?”
“No. Where?—Yeah! But where it come from, so soft? I never heard Song dat soft!”
“Him! Duh boy here, dis boy. It’s you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, yeah! Because you still too young. But some day you gon’ come along with us!”
“I’ll come now.”
“Not yet,” said the reggaezza. “Grow some. Get in some trouble. Look at dose legs you got!—dancer, ain’t you? Well, baby brudder, yull dance much better with yo heart broke bad.”
“The best dancers need a broken heart?”
“Yup.”
“Is your heart broken?”
“Oh, sure. And fresh every day. Yull see.” The reggaezza lay her head on the boy one’s shoulder and closed her eyes.
The reggaezzo said, “I member how bad it was, Johnny boy, but you just got to stay patient. By and by some night you gon’ hear all ten, twelve living come up duh road, and a tousand ghosts. Duh sweetest Song you ever heard by far. Duh singers all singing, some with carry-drum playing, and I be dere with duh guitarristas. You come on down dancing and join us. Climb high up duh Ladder-to-Heaven. We’ll take you over Mevilla. Get you some lights like dese.”
A galaxy spiraled on the reggaezzo’s cheek, clotted at the center with stars algae-colored and luminous—he reached to touch one. And felt nothing but hot human skin, though his fingertips came away flickering green. He brought up the glimmers to his face, wanting to see them better, but the bright motes suddenly winged off his hand, back to the reggaezzo’s cheek where they’d been. The shock of it was like a roach scuttling away, then abruptly bursting into flight back towards your head. With a squeak and jump, he stumbled over some hairy half of broken coconut, and fell in the sand. The pretty reggaezzo laughed, showing bright teeth. “Scared you, huh?”
As a keepsake of this night, he wanted know: “What is your name?”
“Ain’t got one. Soon as you one of us, yo name just wash away out of duh world forever.”
“But what was it before? Your name back when you lived with your Mamans and your Papas?”
“I told you: I don’t know. The name missing and won’t be found. Like a wave come to duh beach last year, where dat wave now? If God know all things, She forgot my name. It’s just gone. Call me reggaezzo, call her reggaezza, if you want. We nothing else.”
The reggaezza leapt up, the poncho falling away, and she cried out, “I feel good! I feel good! Let’s go way over dere where it’s more room and brudder you just play me a fast song, a wild song, duh strongest song you got! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
She tore away through the crowd and the reggaezzo snatched up his guitarra and ran away after her. Stay put, Batalha had said, and those words pulled him back down, chained to that spot in the sand, or he’d surely have followed. He reckoned it was all right to reach over and gather back his poncho just lying there abandoned. So he did. Then a new thing stirred in him and the chains broke. Get in some trouble, she had said. He stood up.
“O ermano mio.” O my brother!
He looked back towards the cry and there came his sister staggering. She was bloodsoaked, awash in gore, the knife hanging from her grip and dripping, it was that wet.
“Batalha! They cut you? Where are you hurt?”
“Me? No. I’m fine.” Seeing the condition of her knife, she stropped off the wet black shine onto her ruined poncho, and slid the blade back in its sheath. “That other time I stuck the saltdog just a little and it was enough to scare him off.” Batalha sounded very sad, nothing like herself. “This dude though—he just wouldn’t quit. He wouldn’t go away. I had to cut him down stone dead.”
φ
[Todas las noches]
saw the reggaezzi once before. He was too young to remember.
As a baby, at the Festival of San Maurizio: when the reggaezzi come down in force to give a show on the seafront Board. Then, Johnnys bring out their ailing loved ones, their sick of heart, their babies, and any family grown elderly o
r close to passing. Great blessing will visit whosoever attends San Maurizio. No reggaezzi miss who yet live. If all are there, then surely those bereft parents in the crowd need only crane their heads, and blink away the tears, to catch a glimpse of their doomed youth, their child. Which one? What was his or her name? They no longer know—but perhaps the one on drums, or that other one there, dancing, had been theirs.
Savary takes him off the breast and turns him round. She sits him up on the shelf of a forearm. “There, ! You see them?”
He cannot see much. Why won’t they let him down and free, to wriggle forward through the crowd as Batalha had? They’re all crushed among jostling hundreds back here, though nobody is frightened, so he’s not either. Certainly can hear the song. Sweet and powerful, a choir delves deep and soars high, all to the greater glory of one soloist, some apocalyptic soprano. Drumbeats, wild and precise, overwhelm the rhythms of his own heart and breath; in time, ecstatic, shudders, held perched to Savary’s breasts. But glimpses are few and far between, as are the gaps among arms and backs and shoulders of the crowd. There’s nothing much to see, really, save occasional flashes of green light.
“Mamita, really now! How’s the baby supposed to see from way down there? Give me him.” Jahs lifts him away and up, a full foot higher to her shoulders where at last there’s some bit of view. Those gorgeous lights belong to people. Green glow freckles their skin, and some great master, perhaps the music itself, exerts sublime puppetry on the abandoned leaping of their bodies. Still, he can only see top halves, only torsos.
“More, more!” beats fists atop the head against his belly, punishing its offensive and inadequate height.
“Baby, stop. What are you doing? What’s the matter with you?”
Jahs’s chief attributes are goodness, clarity, and strength. The thing called for now, however, is stature.
“Papa, up up!” he shouts, stretching his hands toward Redamas: much the tallest being in the crowd, and from whose shoulders, once is hefted there on high, the vantage is astounding.
Grace is down here, available to the flesh for embodiment at every single moment. These wonderful creatures are showing him how to do it! Wildly sobs, shaking his head, wrapping his arms tight about Redamas’s brow, when Jahs reaches to lift him down for mothercomfort. “No no no,” he screams. I want to “see!” I want to “see!” Beauty’s only ever a soft thing? It never harrows?
“Woman—ow. Why are you hitting me, Jahs? Don’t hit! You see the boy is holding on for dear life. He wants to watch.”
“Man, my baby is crying! You hand him down to me, Redy, or I will cut you like a pirate right here in the streets!”
Steal the Sky
Erik Owomoyela
Running Hawk was the sort of woman who gets harder to describe, the more words you try to use.
She spent ten years in boarding school where they tried to make her a proper American, but she’d tell me it only half worked. She wouldn’t answer to Lucy, the name they’d given her, and she named our ship Wakinyan, after the Lakota thunder spirit. But she didn’t wear beads or put feathers in her hair, and the buckskin jacket and scarf she favored made her look more Calamity Jane than Pocahontas. And as much as she hated the memory of that school, she never tried going back to her people.
A long time went by before she truly made sense to me. And it was quite an adventure along the way.
∫
We dropped tether at Lancaster Airfield after braving one of the worst storms I ever flew in, spending a full day being blown sideways across the Sand Hills and dodging twisters above the Platte. We had been up all night, dropped most of our ballast, and our engine was burning on embers, but we expected the trouble was behind us.
By the time we secured the airship and set foot on the ground, three men in Navy blue had arrived to explain how wrong we were.
“The Naval Air Corps needs a fast ship for a critical mission,” Commander William Kendrick declared, a bare second after we’d been introduced. He had blond hair trimmed into respectable sideburns, and enough of a tan to show he didn’t work at a desk, but he was already sweating himself dry in the Nebraska sun. To his left was a scrawny Lieutenant who wore a brass harness so a bald eagle could perch on his shoulder, and to his right were a stocky Master Chief and a chimpanzee in a tiny uniform that I didn’t know what to make of.
Hawk just folded her arms and stared at them all. She didn’t have much time for men with authority on the best of days, and I gathered that I would have to be the reasonable one.
“How can we help the Navy, Commander?” I asked.
Kendrick nodded to the Master Chief, who whistled at the chimp, which hopped forward and thrust a folded piece of crisp white paper out in our direction. I took it, once it was clear Hawk didn’t mean to.
“The USS Dayton, our most advanced airship, was taken last night in a mutiny,” Kendrick said, as I unfolded the paper. On it were a number of very small words, a signature, and a stamp with the Navy seal. “Recovering that ship is critical for the national defense.”
Without looking away from the Commander, Hawk held out her hand toward me. I gave her the paper, which she folded back up and stuck under her arm after barely a glance at it.
Kendrick was looking from myself to Hawk and then back again, the way folks usually do when they see a Negro man and an Indian woman and they need to treat one of us with respect. As usual, he settled on me. “Now, Mr. …West, was it?” We’d been introduced not half a minute earlier. “Obviously, we’re in need of the fastest ship we can find, and it seems your ship—”
“My ship,” Hawk said.
Kendrick blinked at her, as if he had started to think she was mute.
“Her ship,” I agreed. Technically the ship belonged to E.W. Sweeney, our sponsor, but he wasn’t there to speak up.
Kendrick responded like any officer would, by frowning a minute and then talking on as if we hadn’t spoke. “Seems you’ve made excellent time. We weren’t expecting any racing ships to arrive before tomorrow.”
Hawk shrugged. “The rest of them won’t. And if your mutineers are heading for New York, I’ll tell them to give your ship back while we’re passing them by.”
The Commander’s frown was creeping into his sideburns. “Miss Hawk—”
“Captain.”
Kendrick looked about to choke for a second. “Captain Hawk, I shouldn’t need to explain how serious this is. Your country is in need of you.”
“My country?” Hawk scoffed out the first word with her least ladylike snort. “I don’t think I need any more uniforms telling me what your country wants.”
I did not want to see where this line of conversation would end. “I think what Hawk means,” I began, “is—”
“I can speak for myself,” Hawk interrupted, eyes still on Kendrick. “And I say what I mean.”
Hawk puts a lot of importance into getting her way. From the look of him, so did Kendrick. “Whatever issue you have with your government, Miss Hawk, this is a matter of the utmost importance. Your cooperation—” he stressed the word “—would be a service.”
Hawk spat on the ground. The Navy men all flinched; even the eagle ruffled its feathers a bit. “I need to check my ship,” she said. “We’ve had a rough night.”
The Navy men didn’t make any move to stop her from stalking off and disappearing around the far side of our docking tower. I wondered why for a second, until I noticed they all had their eyes on me.
“I’m sorry about her,” I said, using my most sorrowful voice. “Most of her family died in the Indian Wars, and she doesn’t care for uniforms much.”
Kendrick just shook his head. “I don’t have the time for this woman’s sensibilities, Mr. West, whatever she blames the Navy for. I’d appreciate if you talked some reason into her.”
At least he thought I was someone he could work with. We discovered early on that Hawk has a talent for making me look like a gentleman by comparison. “It’s not all personal,” I said. “
We have a lot riding on this race. There’s a five-hundred-dollar purse for the first ship to reach Omaha, and a thousand for the first to New York. For folks like us, that’s our future on the line.”
That didn’t seem to impress him. “Mr. West, our whole nation’s future could be on the line here. Our aerial Navy is critical to security in the northwestern frontier, and the Dayton isn’t any small part of that. What you do here is going to get noticed, all the way back to Washington.”
I didn’t see what a few hills in Dakota or trees in Oregon had to do with the future of America, but I let that go. “Even so, she’s not likely to help just out of patriotism. At the least, she’ll want to fly on to Omaha and collect the five hundred.”
Kendrick’s scowl never seemed to run out of new lines to make on his face. “She wants money, is that it? Damn mercenaries.”
“It’s not just that, sir. We were in San Francisco four days ago; if we can make Omaha by tonight, that’s two days faster than anyone’s done before. Money’s not nothing, but she really wants the record.”
“Well, she’ll have to settle for money. Because the Navy needs your ship, Mr. West, and you’re not flying up to Omaha just to get your names in the papers while our property is out there being hijacked.”
I knew not to try pushing the matter past that. “I’ll talk to her,” I said, and left the man loitering by the ship.
Wakinyan was the only ship tethered in the airfield, and so we had attracted a fair bit of attention: Already a dozen dockhands and a pair of great apes were hauling up crates of provisions, coal, wood and ballast, or just milling around for a chance to be around some action. It was typical for Lancaster: This was 1884, and the city had grown large enough to get one foot out of the frontier, but it was still a long way west of the Mississippi.
